How shared cultural knowledge and institutions shape human perceptions and decisions about land, livelihood, and disaster risks.
With a long-term research focus in Nepal and the US Southwest, Milan uses both qualitative and quantitative data enhanced with geospatial analysis to understand and reveal complex drivers and patterns of socio-ecological-technological systems underlying sustainability issues. His recent work examines the roles of shared cultural knowledge and institutions on smallholder agriculture decision-making, land‑use change, urban sustainability, and local responses to and lived experiences of climate change and glacial hazards and risks, particularly in the Himalayan region.
Research projects
Teaching
Biosketch
Milan Shrestha is a Teaching Professor and Deputy Director of Student Success in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Guided by the ASU Charter’s mission of ensuring accessibility to quality higher education, he is dedicated to making sustainability education relevant, rigorous, and impactful for students from diverse academic and life backgrounds. He provides academic leadership in curriculum design and instructional deployment across both in-person and digitally immersive learning environments.
Milan has played a key role in developing curricula that equip students to think critically about complex sustainability challenges, emphasizing systems dynamics, ethical reasoning, and future-oriented strategic actions. His instructional leadership supports programs that help students from all disciplines—not just sustainability—understand how environmental, social, technological, and institutional processes interact across scales and over time.
As an instructor, Milan teaches foundational sustainability courses alongside advanced seminars on climate and disaster risks. His pedagogy emphasizes research-informed learning through case studies, applied data analysis, and effective communications. He is deeply committed to inclusive teaching and the design of learning experiences that support student success across all modalities, with a particular focus on first-generation, nontraditional, and globally engaged learners.
Milan intentionally integrates research into his instruction, creating pathways for students to participate in collaborative, applied scholarship. Trained as an environmental anthropologist and sustainability scientist, he mentors undergraduate and graduate students on research teams that combine socio-economic insights with geospatial analysis. Through these experiences, students develop analytical, ethical, and professional skills while contributing to ongoing sustainability research.
His research examines the roles of shared cultural knowledge and institutions on smallholder agriculture decision-making, land‑use change, urban sustainability, and local responses to and lived experiences of climate change and glacial hazards and risks, particularly in the Himalayan region.
Milan’s recent updates →Arizona State University, Tempe
(480) 965-7175
Culture, decisions and environmental change in Nepal and the US Southwest.
With a long-term research focus in Nepal and the US Southwest, Milan’s research focuses on how shared cultural knowledge and rules shape people’s perception and decision-making on these sustainability challenges:
As an applied anthropologist, his research projects are interdisciplinary in nature. He combines anthropological methods (e.g., ethnography, surveys, ethnoecology) with geospatial analysis and visualization techniques to better understand the intersectionality between societal roles and complex patterns of environmental change such as deforestation, urban growth, landscape fragmentation, and melting glaciers.
More recently, his research has focused on the climate change–water–agriculture nexus, particularly how people respond to climate change, glacial flood hazards and disaster risks, and how their sociocultural, economic and institutional factors might influence their social adaptation strategies.
Research projects
All project pages
Results of these studies are on the Publications page.
Solid, fun course experiences that build critical thinkers with empathy.
Milan has been teaching at Arizona State University since 2010. He normally teaches eight sections of five different courses (about 150–300 students) in the School of Sustainability. These classes draw upon his background in ecological and environmental anthropology and his post-doctoral research on land-use decision and urban dynamics. His challenge is to teach sustainability majors with a wide range of interests — ecology, policy, urban planning, economics and business sustainability, energy and materials — and his approach has always been to sensitize students to the social dimensions of sustainability challenges.
As an educator, Milan’s career goal is to see his students succeed as sustainability scholars and practitioners who are always ready to conceptualize sustainability challenges and have the skills and confidence to tackle them. He believes teaching is more than a job or an academic chore: it is a tremendous responsibility that requires untiring dedication to stay updated, prepared, and engaged in each class — and that research is an integral part of teaching.
Three areas of learner-centred education
Current courses
Publications & presentations
Peer-reviewed journal articles
Book chapters
Conference proceedings
Book review
Editorials, reports, opinions & encyclopedia entries
Technical reports & monographs
Invited presentations
Papers & posters
From the field
Video and photographs from fieldwork in the Himalaya and the US Southwest.